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TRIUMF Brand Story

A refreshed look for TRIUMF

October 31, 2017

TRIUMF is turning the big 5-0 in 2018. As our organization prepares for this milestone anniversary, it has also been engaging our community in conversations to develop our 2020-25 Five-Year Plan, a key strategic report that defines the lab’s vision and mission, in addition to communicating key priorities.

As you can imagine, this convergence has led to a necessary period of strategic reflection as TRIUMF both looks back on its dynamic fifty year history and proceeds along the path to envision its future. This provided a natural opportunity to consider TRIUMF’s brand identity, including our visual look and feel, how we share the TRIUMF story, and how we might provide a stronger and more unified foundation for future communications.

Our brand identity is an expression of TRIUMF and its values, of who we are and what we believe in. Realized with input from our community, it’s our pleasure to share TRIUMF’s refreshed visual identity with you, along with the basic tool kit you need to implement it.

THE CYCLOTRON AND THE LOGO

An incredible feat of engineering, TRIUMF is the proud home of the world’s largest cyclotron. The imagery of the cyclotron reflected in the logo has constituted a substantial part of TRIUMF’s visual identity since it was first used in this way going back to the laboratory’s early days.

While the literal representation of the six magnets and beamlines has persisted as a collective graphic symbol over the years, TRIUMF has grown to be much more than this visual interpretation that constituted our old logo. Over its five decades, TRIUMF has continuously evolved, pushing the frontiers of science and discovery. Our community and its scientific endeavours have developed in lockstep with this evolution – becoming even more diverse, collaborative, and innovative.

As we explored options to revitalize our visual identity, we challenged ourselves to think past, present, and future as TRIUMF celebrates a milestone fifty years of science, discovery, and innovation and looks with excitement to the next. We sought input from members of our community and took their comments to heart. With that, our explorations led us towards a modest refresh and the end result:

A simple, dynamic, and memorable symbol that honours our mighty cyclotron as an icon, yet is more idiographic to better convey how TRIUMF has enriched its capabilities and evolved to be more multifaceted over its fifty year journey. This enduring, bold, and adaptive symbol is paired with a complementary typeface, Helvetica Neue, celebrating our spirited community and the people behind our scientific excellence. We’ve further fortified our new logo with the selection of our leading colour, pure cyan, a timeless and energetic choice which has a traditional use linked to science and innovation.

A NEW TAGLINE

As we contemplated our logo, it was only fitting to simultaneously consider its linguistic counterpart: our tagline. We feel our new tagline embodies our dynamic spirit and captures our core essence.

A SHORTER DESCRIPTOR

Canada’s particle accelerator centre

Lastly, we recognized that our previous descriptor was a bit of a mouthful! We think our new release hits the mark, helping to concisely explain what TRIUMF does in clear language.

As we prepare to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2018, we can’t help but be mindful of our incredible journey to this point and profoundly grateful to all those who have been part of our story. We hope you share our enthusiasm for our refreshed look – which simultaneously honours the spirit of discovery and innovation that has propelled us to where we are today and to where we are going. We’re excited as we look ahead – to 2018 and beyond – and hope you will join us as we continue our spirited scientific adventures.